This past November, District of Colorado Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter ordered William P. Ramey III of Ramey LLP to show cause in writing “why he should not be referred to the Court’s Committee on Conduct for his neglectful behavior in this case, including his failure to appear at a scheduling conference and his failure to serve any discovery”. Ramey’s response was to address five specific pieces of information “relevant to the issues of whether Mr. Ramey and his firm are spread too thin to provide competent representation”. Ramey filed his response—the contents of which have pulled back the curtain on a broad patent monetization operation, including arguably improper legal work, numerous inaccurate certificates of interested parties, and third-party litigation funding lurking in the shadows.

In December, Northern District of California Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley indicated that the court “does not condone [plaintiff ALD Social LLC’s] attempt to monetize Apple’s pandemic-era effort to save lives”. The court also agreed with Apple that the case that ALD Social filed against it “lacked merit”; however, it refused to shift attorney fees against ALD Social, its counsel Ramey LLP, or its alleged funder AiPi Solutions, ruling that Apple “fails to show by a preponderance of the evidence [that] ALD Social’s conduct in this case warrants an exceptional case finding”, swatting away some of ALD Social’s behavior as mere “bad manners”.

In September 2022, ALD Social LLC, a Delaware plaintiff represented by Ramey LLP, filed a barrage of Western District of Texas complaints, one against each of Alert Media, Alphabet (Google), Apple, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile), Verizon, and Verkada. Since then, things have not gone well for ALD Social, for its litigation counsel, and for the alleged funder behind the campaign. Earlier this month, briefing completed on a motion for attorney fees filed by Apple in the Northern District of California. There, Apple seeks a shift of $740,481.55 in fees and asks District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley to hold Ramey LLP jointly and severally liable for that amount in part because “of a pattern of vexatious litigation”. Apple also asks the court to rope in ALD’s alleged funder because without it, ALD, one among many alleged “judgment-proof clients” of Ramey LLP, “likely cannot pay any fees awarded to Apple”. Apple has listed for the court 15 other suits in which Ramey LLP has provided representation, suits involving orders assessing fees and costs that purportedly combine to a total of $3M.

Cisco (6:23-cv-00517), Juniper Networks (6:23-cv-00518), Microsoft (Metaswitch Networks) (6:23-cv-00519), and Oracle (6:23-cv-00520) have been sued in a new campaign targeting the provision of networking products (e.g., gateways, border controllers, and routers) that support certain session management functionalities. Filing the quad of Western District of Texas complaints is a company that calls itself “SLS Manager Technologies LLC”, allegedly formed in Delaware; however, state records do seem to raise a potential issue with that characterization.

MDSP Technologies LLC has launched litigation in the Western District of Texas with separate suits against Alphabet (Google) (6:23-cv-00257), Apple (6:23-cv-00254), Garmin (6:23-cv-00255), Samsung (6:23-cv-00259), and TomTom (6:23-cv-00260). Asserted are two patents generally related to using “Doppler frequency observables” on a mobile device to determine speed, with the complaints targeting various devices (e.g., navigation devices, smartphones, and smartwatches) for the alleged incorporation of “Doppler aided navigation systems”.

This past quarter, US patents continued to spread among NPEs, including to familiar faces in patent monetization, and while some of those recipients have yet to file any litigation, several did launch new campaigns during Q3, targeting players in the Networking market sector, wireless carriers, e-commerce or software companies, and device makers, among others.

ALD Social LLC has followed up the mid-September launch of its first patent litigation with a new case filed against Verizon (6:22-cv-01011). The defendants hit earlier in the month are Alert Media, Alphabet (Google), Apple, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile), and Verkada, all seven of them now accused of infringing a pair of patents generally related to an “aggregate location dynometer”, an ALD, “in a physical wireless network server”, through the provision of emergency communications solutions (for Verizon, its Wireless Emergency Alerts system). Western District of Texas Judge Fred Biery, by operation of that district’s new case assignment policy, presides over the litigation.

Currently available USPTO assignment records contain two 2022 divestments from a subsidiary of Comtech Telecommunications, one to Artax LLC, executed in April; and the other to ALD Social LLC, in late July. Both of those recipients have now turned plaintiff, Artax suing TomTom (4:22-cv-00737) in the Eastern District of Texas over the provision of various navigation products, including the TomTom Go Navigation app and TomTom Routing API; and ALD Social hitting Alert Media (6:22-cv-00959), Alphabet (Google) (6:22-cv-00972), Apple (6:22-cv-00969), AT&T (6:22-cv-00970), Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile) (6:22-cv-00973), and Verkada (6:22-cv-00975) in the Western District of Texas over the provision of their respective emergency communication solutions.

Recent months have seen a number of patent divestments by operating companies made public, with a range of assignees including frequent filers, publicly traded patent assertion entities, third-party funded plaintiffs, and newly formed NPEs. Divestment size has also varied widely—from a single transacted patent to thousands.